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They weren’t around for that long, but IBM’s microdrive had a major impact on multiple industries.

Hi, I am tinkering in my spare time with legacy server equipment. Even if it is completly out of date, the resilience of the hardware ist phenomenal. I got my hands recently on an old IBM eServer xSeries 360 8686 2EQ. It posted ok, but had issues with the ServeRAID 4m Controller, whose battery has leaked all over the controllerboard. I removed the battery and startet to update the ASM firmware and such via ASM. Somehow I got a faulty disk image to boot with and since then, the server will not post anymore. It turns on, the display lights up, displays the IBM logo and the number of installed CPU's and then reboots. I reset the ASM card to factory defaults and even changed the mainboard, since the USB ports were shot, CR2032 recepticle was broken and additional damage from the bad battery from the RAID controller. Remote access to the ASM is still possible, nothing in the log. Any ideas how to get it up and running again? Does anyone have the codes for the two 7-segment displays on the memory adapter? Or the description of the two jumpers on the ASM card? I cannot find anything in the IBM documentation. Thanks for reading this Happy New Year Torkum73

Summary IBM have now created a 2nm chip in one of its labs. IBM says that the chip can improve performance by 45% compared to the current 7nm chips found in Ryzen. They also said that the chip uses 75% less energy as well. It claims the tech could quadruple mobile phone battery life. IBM claim they can fit 50 billion transistors on the size of a fingernail to roughly quote IBM. My thoughts IBM may have done it now but will take ages for the desktop computing industry moving towards this new standard. There was a four year interval between IBM getting 7nms and AMD's Ryzen processors having them in 2019. Intel still hasn't transitioned to 7nm. I predict that 2nm will first appear publicly and attainably, is in mobile phone processor chips. But what is really strange about this is that IBM are telling us about the future of chips, when we can't even get hold of the current latest and greatest chips. This chip shortage is not only affecting the tech industry but also the car industry and many, many others. This is the worst time possible to announce this. Sources https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57009930

i have been designing a IBM compatible for fun but one small problem i dont have the BIOS ROM and without that i will just have a nice paperwhite. so if you know of how to get the rom for the BIOS thanks

Long-term storage has achieved yet another milestone. As you know, tape drives provide an incredible amount of storage capacity for a relatively cheap price. And this is another leap. Source: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/12/16/ibm-and-fujifilm-580tb-tape-capacity-record/

Pointless Intro: So I’ve been building PC’s since I was 13, I’ve had Athlons, A6/A10, FX, Ryzens, Pentiums, i3/i5/i7 I’ve swung at everything I can possibly hit. And because of that I thought, building a server would be easy as pie, it was not. So I ‘recently’ bought had 3 servers off gumtree, for the total of £60. A HP DL380, A Dell Power Edge (Sold very Quick) and today’s offender a 2002 IBM eServer. Problem: So I’m in the process of trying to load a new OS (Windows Server 2000) onto it, but every time I try and download it off of a CD Drive, the server then try’s to boot by network. It’s more than happy to boot from Floppydisk, and would happily run MS-Dos (only OS I had lieing around on floppy), but it will not under any circumstances load from the CD. Im having some ‘mild’ issues with my switches right now, so I can’t try anything network related at the moment, and due to the server only having 1 USB port, and the fact I would have to run my boot OS, keyboard and mouse through the same 2.0 port, has me a tad nervous. Also I don’t think it will be able to get drivers as I cannot get an Ethernet connection reliably to it. If not, I’m looking to Erase whatever partitions are on the current hard drives, and stupidly sold the only working server immediately. So if anyone has any idea how to erase 320 Ultra SCSI’s using no OS, I’d be over the moon to hear it. TL;DR: Cannot get Server to run an OS that isn’t in floppy. Need Help.

So this is an interesting piece of kit that I recently came across. The Expansion unit (Top) is build inside of an IBM pc chassis, but is mostly empty inside. It links to the host with a special card that is apparently very rare due to them being commonly discarded. Also the cable they use to attach is MASSIVE. After doing some preliminary research this seems to be a very rare item to have, never mind having it complete and functioning.. It was a very cool find and I currently have a CGA card, and a modem card installed in this alongside the hard disk controller and receiver card.

June 19 2019 IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat. Nearly a year and a half later the company has so much confidence in RedHat's parent devision, The Cloud Devision, that they no longer want to be associated with Mainframes and other Infistructure services. The Cloud Devision is the only growing devision inside IBM. Due to massive cost cuts in R&D, labor, and investment as well as using creative accounting practices IBM was able to delay some of the huge issues its been facing since the 90's at bay until around 5 - 6years ago. The traditional mainframe devision has been threatened by basic x86 servers for decades, and the last decade of evolving cloud hosting companies has effectively nailed closed most of IBM into a weighted coffin and tossed them into the ocean. IBM has been a long time investor in Linux, but also a sort of fair weather friend in regards to percentage of spend reletave to size of company. Remember in 2009 IBM was the forth largest company in the world. And its Linux investments have played critical roles in the early years. IBM invested a billion dollars in 2000 on Linux, but has since been easily overshadowed by others Including Facebook who has spent an estimated 16billion dollars on open source technologies. It's presumed that IBM both hopes to jump the stock price by changing their narrative, and change the management focus of the company and investors into greater R&D spend. Other more successfull Coud Giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are heavily invested in A. I. and open source. P. S. Open source is not necessarily a silver bullet for every Cloud company, at least in my opinion. But it's hard as a private company to get free spec work if your customers and enthusiasts can't see your code. Summary 10 Years of declining infrastructure management, (aka mainframe,) services sales and IBM has decided to spin off the division into its own company. Quotes My thoughts Layoffs, outsourcing, and massive cuts to R&D for decades led to little room for new internal business growth. If they wish to maintain the growth of the Cloud Division, aka Watson and Redhat, then they need to kill off the old guard. Hopefully they stop the disorganized cost management at all costs strategy and turn around like Microsoft has under Satya Nadella. It would suck to see RedHat, formerly the largest open source company and the birthplace of kvm*, crumble like the rest of IBM has. Sources . https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/08/ibm-shares-surge-on-plans-to-spin-off-unit-into-separate-publicly-traded-company-.html . https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/18/ibm_q2_fy2019_decline/ . https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-21/ibm-beats-estimates-ekes-out-revenue-growth-on-cloud . https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-landmark-acquisition-red-hat-34-billion-defines-open-hybrid-cloud-future . https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IBM/ . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine . https://itsfoss.com/ibm-invest-1-billion-linux/ . https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2020/08/facebooks-long-history-of-open-source-investments-deepens-with-platinum-level-linux-foundation-membership/

Saw this pass video pass through my subscription feed, while watching it I thought to myself "this would make linus wet" and therefore the community might like it too. Not sure how much crossover there is between LTT viewers and the EEVBlog, if you are interested in real electronics you should give Dave Jones a watch. EEVblog #1341 - AMAZING $250,000 IBM Processor Teardown! The construction of the "heat spreader" is amazing and cools 121 silicon dies on a single ceramic substraight with 2772 pins. This is a real processor, they would have many in a mainframe for enterprise compute. Can anyone beat that in CPU size alone? (Edit: I can spell)

Hello people! This is my first post so I apologise if I posted in the wrong place or didn't follow decorum. A couple of months ago I bought an old IBM System x3650 M2 server (Geekbench score here for more info) for about 200 dollars. I wanted to buy it primarily to play around more with server hardware without having to worry about pricing or buying myself in on a VPS somewhere in the cloud. It runs Ubuntu 20.04 (which is also something I want more practice in) and I want to use it for various things. Mostly to run a bunch of docker containers for local network services I want as well as acting as a PLEX server. Now the thing is; I'm rather new to all this and while I will watch LTTs videos on PLEX again to get familiar with that part, I do want to ask the smart heads here about what storage you think might make sense to buy? I am not looking for anything overkill. I am an average consumer and I'm looking for affordable storage that should fit the 200 dollar server. Perhaps even a RAID setup might make sense, which I've never tried to setup before. I believe it has trays for 2.5'' and should be able to do SSD and HDD. Any suggestions?

I was given this IBM Blade Center S, (https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/overview-ibm-bladecenter-s) with the thought of using it as a NAS and or a Plex Server. I have no clue how to set it up, can anyone help me?

I'm still considered a young frog in this pond, but even young ones like me still learn fast and know what they know, even if that knowledge is incomplete. So, give this young frog a bit of time with your ear. The era between the i386 and Pentium 4 for the most part precedes my birth, but I was here for Core 2 Duo/Quad, Athlon X2/4, the first Core processor from Intel, Bulldozer, Nehalem, Piledriver/Vishera, Sandy Bridge, the birth of the APU, Steamroller, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Excavator, and most recently Skylake. I've seen the big jumps come. I've seen what people complain about: slowdowns in performance gains. This isn't just true for synthetic benchmarks that don't see updates for years after they're finished. It's true even for modern games and apps. The difference between Sandy Bridge and Haswell for modern games tends to be between 3 and 10% per clock. Between Haswell and Skylake, in a few rare cases, we see a tiny loss of performance. The key question is this: why? Why are these gains so small now when Nehalem to Sandy alone was 15%, and we got big overclocking out of the deal? The answer put shortly is "it's complicated." To be persnickety, it's many-faceted, but the individual facets are not complicated on their own. I think it's best to start with x86 itself. If you've only ever heard about assembly instructions in the dreadful light of using them to program without really taking a look and understanding what those "words" all do, you can't hope to understand the fundamental limits of computing beyond a superficial level. http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64-ia-32-architectures-software-developer-manual-325462.pdf It takes nearly 4000 pages to describe how x86 processors work today, list and elaborate on every single instruction, and describe good system programming practices for the architecture. That's because there are more than 200 instructions you can choose from, and there are many ways to solve a coding problem. You have instructions which contain 1 or more steps. Some very short algorithms have been reduced to a single instruction, reducing the sizes of executables and shaving clock cycles. This holds true for AMD and VIA in addition to Intel. If this surprises you, then I think you should ask yourself where performance comes from in the first place. We still have the instructions available to us that do 1 thing at a time to 1 piece of data. They are the core of x86 and x86_64. Without them, you can't solve any problem with an x86 processor. You may think of these instructions as the heart or core of x86. They fall into a more general concept/category in computer architecture theory called SISD; or Single-Instruction, Single-Data. These cover everything from mathematical operations on 2 operands to 1 or 2-operand logical operations to bit shifting on singular 8/16/32/64/80-bit data types (yes, 80, usually used for extra precision floats). These instructions are simple: easy to read and understand, easy to count clock cycles on and tune performance for. But, that sword cuts 2 ways. Though they are relatively easy to optimize with, you need many, many more of them to solve a given problem relative to newer, complex instructions that do 2 or more things. That requires larger executable sizes. It requires your caches hold more instructions, thus constraining your performance. It also kneecaps modern hardware that can optimize beyond the level a compiler is capable of. These days, nearly every processor available has a superscalar engine in every core: hardware that reorders instructions to be able to interleave them and squeeze more performance for you. That said, there's a limited number of instructions that can be reordered by any such engine. You may also know this as Out of Order Processing. There's a fixed-length buffer in modern ARM, x86, PowerPC, Sparc, and MIPS architectures. If you limit yourself to SISD instructions, these buffers fill up on smaller tasks. The result? Less performance than the hardware is capable of delivering when using modern instructions with multiple steps or those which do 1 step on multiple data at once. So, we have newer instructions that do more. Some are very application-specific (AES extensions to do low-overhead encryption and decryption on the fly), but most aren't. Even for those that are not, compilers can't always optimize code to use them because of complex rules. You can't use MMX, SSE, or AVX on data that isn't aligned properly in address space. I.E. you can't just pull any 4 floats from memory and add them to any other 4 floats. Both groups must be aligned along the natural 128-bit slots in a 64-bit address space. If programmers do not guarantee this in their code, compilers can't assume the data will land squarely in valid address space, and only SISD instructions will be used, but more on that in another post. After newer instructions and the superscalar engine, we have to know about pipelining: the interweaving of steps in multiple instructions so that instructions may execute in partial or even complete concurrency. In computer architecture 101, you'd be told there are four stages in an execution pipeline: Fetch, Decode, Execute, Write-Back. You'd then be shown four cascading rows each starting with fetch, offset by 1 from the row above. In general, this is how pipelining works. While the L1 cache is getting instruction 4, the core can be decoding instruction 3, an ALU can be executing instruction 2, and the results of instruction 1 can be on their way back to cache or main memory. However, with complex, multi-step instructions, there is actually much finer granularity in the execution stage for many pieces of multiple instructions to be working simultaneously. We call these pieces micro-ops or muOps. How many muOps can be executing simultaneously is a large determinant of x86 performance. For Haswell, the total number that can be in-flight at once is a whopping 114, up from 64 in Sandy Bridge. http://www.realworldtech.com/haswell-cpu/3/ That 78% increase didn't make performance jump by 78% though, not even 50%. Most didn't even see 15% over Sandy Bridge. So, what else impacts performance? In terms of cache, a 4790k, 6700k, and a 2600k all have the same 3-tier cache system with the same sizes. Minute reductions in write and read times have been made, but otherwise, this particular aspect has had little improvement. With Nehalem, Intel introduced a Small Loop Detector, a circuit which detects bunches of instructions which are tight loops with a small number of branches. This detection puts the instructions into a buffer for rabid successive execution which removing the fetch stage from the pipeline In Sandy Bridge, this buffer can detect loops up to 32 bytes/28 muOps http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/64-ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.html For Haswell and Skylake, this buffer's size has increased another 6 bytes and 4 muOps. For Sandy Bridge, one can find 3 integer ALUs, a dedicated floating point add, a dedicated floating point multiply, and a 256-bit AVX vector unit, or 6 total arithmetic units distributed across 3 scheduling ports. With Haswell, Intel added a dedicated "store" AGU, freeing up two ports to better distribute arithmetic instructions. Further, Intel added a 4th integer ALU, freeing up ports 0 and 1 for vector instructions. Further, Port 0 and 1 were given vector duties, but port 1 was also given an additional dedicated floating point execution, benefitting legacy workloads that were mixing with modern ones to reduce pipeline pressure and conflicts. This increased scheduling flexibility is also augmented by the increased size of the Out of Order Execution Buffer, the circuit responsible for finding pipeline hazards and reordering instructions to better optimize their execution. Sandy Bridge could handle 168 muOps. Haskell can handle 192. http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc25/HC25.80-Processors2-epub/HC25.27.820-Haswell-Hammarlund-Intel.pdf Yet even with this increased flexibility, reduction in pressure, and increased amount of resources, performance did not increase significantly for most existing software. So, if removing pipeline pressure and contention, improving loop detection, tweaking cache behavior, and extending the width of the Out of Order Scheduler only gained us what some would consider small gains; and if Intel has spent these billions on research, why haven't we seen the benefits to the same degree we used to? For older software, using older instructions, especially those that fall into SISD, those instructions already cannot possibly execute any faster. For the last 4 generations, integer add and multiply have not changed at all. For division, some room remains, but integer division is very expensive and grows more expensive with every extra bit of width. In other words, it's not possible to make them go any faster. Old software is as fast as it can be, more or less, barring any growth in cache sizes and clock speeds; and even then,. However, for newer software, with new knowledge of new instructions that do more, with knowledge of fixed function and optimizing hardware, there is plenty of room for CPU-based performance to scream ahead. It's just going to take some effort to get the software where it needs to be. Therefore, from a hardware perspective, you can't blame Intel for the slowdown of PC performance improvements. It's provided all the groundbreaking new circuit designs to get us where we already are, and no one has yet caught up or surpassed Intel's designs. If the hardware could do more, you can bet Intel would prefer increased sales by selling better hardware for the same R&D price it already pays anyway. Perhaps you could lay some blame for the slowdown in sales and upgrades because of its pricing strategy, but that is its own enormous debate. In my opinion, based on the evidence, the problem does not lay with Intel's hardware. It lays with programmers who don't know how to use it and still write the software we use today.

I have an old IBM x3650 m4 with two E5-2630v2 and 24x 16GB Dual-rank RDIMMs. Till this i ran all 384GB at 1333MHz, now i just wanted to try it with 256GB or 128GB for faster Speeds. If im not mistaken i should get 1866MHz with 1 RDIMM and 1600MHZ with 2RDIMMS. But i only can get 1333MHz. I set every power setting to max, no mirroing or rank sparing and used only the white slots. I attached pictures of my current 128GB configuration. Link to the manual page 50 (62) onwards: https://systemx.lenovofiles.com/help/topic/com.lenovo.sysx.7915.doc/x3650_M4_7915_isg.pdf Has anyone experience with IBM Systems? Am i just stupid and mess up? I can provide more Information if needed. Ty, in advance Specs: IBM x3650 m4 Dual E5-2630v2 24x 16GB 2Rx4 PC3-14900R-13-12-E2-D3

Forgive me if this is the wrong section of the forum. Not done with the restoration, but I am done with one of the IBM Model Ms as well as the Bolt Mod. I found two IBM Model Ms in a abandoned mental asylum. Also IBM 35SX computers. CRTs had wires cut and everything was supposed to be junked 26 years ago. Surprised I found them in the half burnt down building. Doing a full restoration. Computer fired up. Restored + bolt modded one of the Model Ms and got one more to go. The cleaning process was very rigorous, more rigorous than the getting out of the place with a giant ass computer without getting spotted by po po (Lets just say, it aint my first time saving old tech). I wanted to make sure there wasn't a single germ left on this. It was basically a raccoon, rat, and coyote bathroom for 26 years. The animal piss also denigrated part of the traces which had to be painted in which was fun. I'll upload the restoration on YouTube when I'm done editing. (The PC/CRT will be in another video). The place I found it in was more than scary and pretty remote (Especially the part that was burnt to crisp). However, as soon as I saw old computers I hopped right thru that tiny window lmao. Computer appears cleaner in the first photo because it was dusted off a little.

Hello lads, Despite knowing nothing about servers besides a FreeNAS system in a corner, I bought a Lenovo Thinkserver RD640. And it's been leaning up against a wall for the last week. I want to mount it in a rack but the first set of universal rails I bought on eBay didn't work (did get a refund though!) Since I've now learned by trial by fire, How are rails categorized? Do all brands have their own mounting hardware? The only listing I can find that specifically mentions my machine is almost $100. Would RD540 rails work as a substitute? This is a pic of the first set next of rails to my machine. I have no idea what I'm doing. I got it for a good deal and I'm only using it for Minecraft and FreeNAS.

Information has been released about apparent plans that IBM has to release the first commercially available quantum computers. This could mark the first steps toward large-scale implementation of quantum computation which IBM is hoping will accelerate the development of further quantum technologies. There are not many applications for the technology as of right now, but quantum processing allows for much more data to be stored and represented. http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/03/06/ibm-plans-to-build-first-commercially-available-universal-quantum-computer.html This will likely not have much effect on the consumer market, but for cloud-based computation this could be a huge step forward in applications such as encryption and raw number crunching. Personally I am excited to see IBM's return to the forefront of technological research and development. What do you all think?

IBM has managed to store data on a single atom! The new Atomic Hard Drive as they call it has nothing to do with destruction but in fact has the ability to store a bit of data on a single atom. Read these articles to find out more: https://www.cnet.com/news/ibm-storage-atom-breakthrough-quantum-computing-research/ https://www.cnet.com/news/ibm-creates-data-storage-at-the-atomic-level/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/08/storing-data-in-a-single-atom-proved-possible-by-ibm-researchers/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ibms-atomic-innovation-makes-your-hard-drive-100000-times-terry

Pretty sure it supports an mAtx motherboard, and I'll have to measure for GPU size. I'm not sure how the PSU cables are suppose to make it inside the case, I can't remember what it looked like when I gutted it. Also there is a bit of rust, and this odd pink splash on the metal side panel, any suggestions on how to get rid of that? Solid metal construction and only one small area for an intake fan, should I be concerned about temps? I'm thinking about Ryzen 5 and maybe a 1060 / RX 480. Any suggestions on how to move forward would be great, I currently don't have any of the components.

https://www.wired.com/2017/06/ibm-silicon-nanosheets-transistors/ This will help break the 7nm lower limit on the FinFET process, so dies can continue getting smaller for at least a few more processor generations. IBM Research scientist Nicolas Loubet holds a wafer of chips with 5nm silicon nanosheet transistors manufactured using an industry-first process that can deliver 40 percent performance enhancement at fixed power, or 75 percent power savings at matched performance.CONNIE ZHOU “The world’s sitting on this stuff, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars. They’re all highly dependent on more efficient computing power. That only comes from this type of technology,” says Hutcheson. “Without this, we stop.”

That's basically it, there's not much else to say, so on to my opinion! Well, hopefully IBM can manage this better than Verizon, and I expect that they will, seeing as how IBM often deals with things like this in their normal business. Source: http://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/2017/05/verizon-to-sell-cloud-and-managed-hosting-service-to-ibm.html

Source: http://www.startrek.com/article/ibms-watson-to-power-bridge-crew-vr-interactive-speech-experience 15 years ago Activision launched a mostly overlooked game called Star Trek: Bridge Commander, which allowed you to command a starship in various scenarios, and included something that was well ahead of its time: voice input. While it did not work well, with it only responding to certain very clearly voiced phrases, and even then often failing, it planted the seed for what could someday be possible for such an experience. Fast forward to today and the currently available virtual reality hardware and that experience is being recreated by Ubisoft with Star Trek Bridge Crew, a single player or co-operative VR experience that allows you and your friends to man the various stations on a starship bridge. What had concerned me personally was how this would work when you were by yourself or didn't have enough friends for all stations. It has now been revealed that the people at IBM are partnering with Ubisoft to integrate IBM Watsons new "VR Speech Sandbox" into this VR game, to provide a (hopefully) totally natural vocal interaction with even virtual members of the bridge crew. For some time people have been talking about VR needing a "killer app" to really take off, something more involved than the plethora of mini-games we have now. If it works as intended, I could see this becoming that killer app.

It would appear the good days of working remotely for IBM are coming to an end... Ars Technica has an article outlining how IBM is informing it's telework employees that they either have to relocate to an office or seek employment elsewhere all the while it is selling the ability for other companies to provide telework services. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-to-remote-workers-come-back-to-the-mothership-or-else/ All I can say is that this is a poor move that doesn't really help them with advertising their own telework solutions... I mean seriously, you tell your customers how 'great' your remote work products are and then get rid of remote workers in your own company. Just doesn't make any sense.

I know this is an odd topic but the question is quite simple, I'm interested in getting an old IBM System Z mainframe for the fun of it and use it to bring some enrichment to the people around me who are into this kind of stuff. I've seen videos of people destructively disassembling old units because they were to be scrapped and I tend to think there are hobbyists who could get some use of them, even just to mess around with. If anyone has any ideas as to where I might look for one, leave a shout here.

I recently found an old IBM Thinkpad 760E laptop. The problem is, it won't boot up properly. There is a little display below the screen with icons showing things such as HDD activity, capslock, etc. One of those is a speaker icon. During power on, the speaker flashes at a constant rate, however, no sound is audible. The screen just displays a very faint corrupt looking image. I can't identify said image. Any suggestions on how to fix the laptop?